Google Keyword Planner Tips for Car Dealership Nerds

Car Dealer PPC | Automotive SEO Company

Want to know killer tips for finding new keywords to bid on in Adwords (and other tier 1 platforms)? How about knowing which keywords you should be bidding on VS the ones that throw your budget down the toilet? Then sit back, have yourself a cup of coffee, and take in these research tips to help you supercharge your PPC campaigns (and help with organic search tool!).

Let’s dive in shall we?

How to Identify Search Volume in GKP

What used to be the Google Keyword External Tool, is now the Google Keyword Planner (You internet marketing veterans know what I’m talking about). And yes, while it took quite a while to adapt from the previous legacy keyword tool, Google’s newest keyword research tool is more powerful than ever. How so? One reason is because it allows you to drill down into search queries at the geographic level. Let’s take a further look.

The first thing you’ll want to do (after signing into your account of course) is to select the ‘Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups’ row. Enter your keyword/s into the search box. Now, be very careful about match types here. They play a critical role in returning accurate results.

In case you’re unaware, there are 3 match types: broad, phrase, and exact (technically there are 4; modified broad match, but we’ll save that for another day). I like to enter exact match keywords here because broad is…well…broad. Using broad match when doing research is a bad idea in most cases. Why? Because the broad match version of that keyword will likely match out to highly irrelevant keywords (ex: different vehicles makes, models, etc) And what are you left with?

Unreliable data.

To avoid this, always use exact match to signify to Google that you want to know exactly how often this keyword is searched for on Google and its search partners. You’ll have a better indication of how much traffic volume there truly is for a given keyword. This brings me to my next point: search partners. What the heck are search partners? What’s Google referring to? Let’s clear this up in case you’re unaware. Adwords allows you to bid on keywords people are searching for on Google. What many fail to realize is that Google actually partners with other search providers and networks to increase search impressions and volume (and revenue for Google, duh). Even non-Google search sites.

So what is considered a ‘Google Search Partner’ you may ask?

Try Google Maps. Google Shopping. Google Images. About.com Aol.

And the list goes on and on…

Unfortunately, there isn’t an official list. In fact, if you can prove me wrong, I’d be willing to give you $20. Knowing this information, it’s critical that you always select the radio option of ‘Google and search partners’. You’ll get more accurate results this way.

Finish uploading your keywords and click submit.

You’ll immediately see search volume data (amongst other juicy data) for the keywords you selected. You’ll also see another important tidbit of information: CPC.

Can’t think of any keywords?

Come up with about 5 seed keywords (make them short, not long tail. ex: ‘honda’). Head over to Uber Suggest and find keyword gold.